Shaping The Future: ASERL’s Competencies For Research Librarians

Introduction

In 1999, the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) established an Education Committee to investigate the educational needs of librarians to support the research library of the future. ASERL members, like other research libraries across the nation, have recently experienced increasing difficulty in finding professionally qualified, motivated applicants to staff their libraries. After several discussions, the Committee determined that one method to help ensure a pool of qualified staff for research libraries in the future is to identify the competencies required for research librarians. The competencies can then be applied within libraries and serve as a basis for dialogue with regional library and information science (LIS) schools and other related programs. Hence, ASERL’s Competencies address several audiences, including LIS educators, current research librarians, prospective research librarians, and those responsible for hiring research librarians.

Competencies have been discussed and developed by many groups in the LIS profession as a means to identify credentials, improve education, describe jobs, and evaluate performance. While existing competencies and related research informed the Education Committee’s discussions, the competencies articulated by ASERL incorporate both skills common to all librarians and those that are unique to research librarians in institutions of higher education. To understand the competencies and apply them effectively, they must be interpreted within the context of the academic research library.

The Research Library of Tomorrow

The future of the academic research library will be shaped in part by the changing environments of higher education, the library and information profession, business and industry, and government. Within a complex educational culture, the research library anticipates the changing expectations of users (faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, scholars), administrators, funding agencies, and an increasingly diverse array of partners (from the community, profession, and business). Technological advances will continue to provide new opportunities for research libraries to create, manage and disseminate information, serve new and often distant users, and enhance teaching and learning. Technology also will challenge the research library as it seeks to equitably and affordably provide and preserve access to information. The academic research library of the future will continue to support learning by creating and fostering a learning environment. It will also function increasingly as a teaching institution, as an active participant in instructional and research processes.

The research library of the future will be challenged by the need to balance traditional collection and service models with resource needs for new initiatives. Primary users of the academic research library in the future will continue to be students, faculty, and staff of the university. However, characteristics of these groups are changing, as is the nature of their use of library services. Demographics show that students are increasingly diverse, often older, more independent and frequently part-time. More users are from outside the university, representing students and faculty from other campuses as well as the independent scholar from both within and beyond the community. All of these users are now able to access the resources of the research library with greater ease due to technology and community partnerships. Faculty and students are pursuing more interdisciplinary studies than ever before, while at the same time, in some areas specialization and fragmentation are increasing. Technology will continue to expand opportunities and provide new challenges for research libraries to serve remote users, distant learners and faculty. Teachers and research librarians will seek new approaches to learning, including just-in-time learning, life-long learning, and distance learning.

The research library is defined by the services provided by the research librarian, not by the physical location of information and collections. The academic research library seeks to take advantage of technology to provide improved or new services, to increase access to resources beyond those owned, to reach more users more effectively, to promote learning, and to enhance teaching throughout the higher education community. At the same time, research libraries maintain and apply traditional values and principles of librarianship to ensure high standards of service. These values and principles include open access to information, respect for individuality and diversity, freedom from censorship, preservation of the human record, commitment to learning and to connecting people to information and ideas, and the importance of excellence in service.

In the future, libraries and librarians will continue to support the teaching and research missions of their universities. They will also participate more actively in the service part of the university’s mission. Research universities and their libraries will continue to work closely with the community beyond the “walls” of the campus. Research libraries will form more partnerships with other libraries to provide services to broader communities and to improve services to their own campuses. One example of this is the critical role research libraries assume as members of statewide and regional virtual library consortia. Outreach activities at research libraries include not only different types of libraries but also businesses and the private sector, especially as higher education seeks to diversify funding sources.

Within the research library itself, the changing nature of use has changed the shape of physical facilities. Universities and librarians will continue to allocate more resources towards technology. As dependency on technology grows in the research library, so will the need for flexibility to ensure that the library can easily move from technology to technology, physically as well as intellectually. Research libraries will continue to have a crucial role in not only providing technology for users but also in creating new information systems for managing, disseminating, and preserving information regardless of format. At the same time, traditional library collections – books, serials, sound recordings, maps, videos, films, photographs, archives, manuscripts, etc. — will still need to be acquired, made accessible, and preserved. The expertise research librarians bring to the identification, selection, acquisition, organization, dissemination, use, and preservation of information will remain as critical to users in the future as it is now.

As information products and services change within the research library, and as the nature of the use of the research library changes, research librarians will develop new tools to measure the effectiveness of the library. Today’s traditional library evaluation tools are often not effective at assessing such factors as outcomes, service quality, electronic resource usage, and information quality. The outcomes of library service in higher education will need to demonstrate the value of the money invested in them by articulating direct links to the quality of learning, teaching, and research. For example, future evaluation tools may allow for new correlations between library use and other academic measures (such as grades), correlations that would quantify the importance of library involvement in instruction.

The research library of today and tomorrow is a dynamic, service-oriented organization, supporting a diverse clientele with a wide range of sophisticated information, learning, and teaching needs. Many exciting opportunities exist for research librarians to develop and apply new approaches to service, to advance the use of technology in support of learning, and to address critical needs in archiving and preserving access to information. The competencies listed below articulate the knowledge, skills, and abilities research librarians need to move their organizations into the future.

Competencies

Attributes of the successful research librarian include intellectual curiosity, flexibility, adaptability, persistence, and the ability to be enterprising. Research librarians possess excellent communication skills. They are committed to life-long learning and personal career development.

1. The research librarian develops and manages effective services that meet user needs and support the research library’s mission.

Supports freedom for all people to form, hold, and express their own beliefs

Preserves the human record

Provides excellence in service

Forms partnerships to advance these values

Conclusion

Research libraries are key partners in higher education, critical to the ability of universities to succeed in teaching and research. Research libraries will also continue to be important sources for the support and promotion of new developments in librarianship. Changes in the library environment, such as technological innovations and legal limitations on the use of information, will continue to offer opportunities for research librarians to gain and apply new knowledge. At the same time, the expertise that librarians have developed in organizing, providing access to, and preserving information will become more important than ever. The research librarian of the future will have more opportunities to support learning, enhance teaching, and improve research, providing services to the users of today as well as anticipating the needs of the users of tomorrow.

Selected Bibliography

Abbott, Andrew. “The Information Profession,” in The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 215-246.

Association for Library and Information Science Education. “Executive Summary” in Educating Library and Information Science Professionals for a New Century: The KALIPER Report. Reston, VA: ALISE, July 2000.

American Library Association. “Report of the Steering Committee on the Congress for Professional Education, June, 1999.” Available at www.ala.org/ala/educationcareers/education/1stcongressonpro/1stcongresssteeringcommittees.cfm.

American Library Association. “Standards for Accreditation of Master’s Programs in Library and Information Studies.” Adopted by the Council of the ALA January 28, 1992; effective January 1, 1993.

“The Keystone Principles.” From the Association of Research Libraries, the ARL Office of Leadership and Management Services, and the Online Computer Library Center, 1999 ARL/OCLC Strategic Issues Forum. Available at http://www.arl.org/leadership/.